VMware to ZStack Series: Boosting Efficiency in Container Operations – Overcoming VMware Tanzu Monitoring Challenges

In today’s rapidly changing digital era, enterprises have unprecedented demands for the performance, efficiency, and flexibility of IT infrastructure. Traditional virtualization technology, as the cornerstone of digital infrastructure, has long played a pivotal role. However, with the rise of microservices architecture and rapid iterative development models, container technology, with its lightweight and rapid deployment characteristics, is becoming a new engine for driving business innovation. For enterprises looking to modernize their infrastructure and improve operational efficiency, the migration path of container products from VMware to ZStack is attracting widespread attention, especially in complex distributed environments where efficient monitoring and log management capabilities become crucial.

Challenges and Opportunities in the Containerization Trend

Cloud computing, with its characteristics of elastic scaling and pay-as-you-go, provides a flexible and efficient resource management platform. Container technology, leveraging its lightweight and rapid deployment advantages, perfectly meets the development needs of rapid iteration and continuous integration under the microservices architecture. However, with the proliferation of container technology, how to effectively monitor and troubleshoot large-scale, dynamically changing containerized environments has become a new challenge. Traditional monitoring tools often struggle to delve into the fine-grained levels inside containers, making it difficult for enterprises to gain deep insights into system operational status when facing complex business systems and diverse scenarios, thereby affecting the efficiency of fault localization and business continuity.

VMware Tanzu: Limitations in Monitoring and Logging

In the field of container orchestration, VMware Tanzu is a familiar product for many enterprises. However, according to recent research, VMware Tanzu’s monitoring and logging functions have certain dimensional limitations. It primarily focuses on basic monitoring at the cluster and server levels, as well as server-level log queries. This relatively limited monitoring dimension often appears inadequate when dealing with the increasingly complex business systems and diverse scenarios of modern enterprises, making it difficult to meet the needs for deep insights into system operation status and rapid identification of the root cause of faults.

Specifically, this dimensional limitation brings multiple challenges. For example, when an enterprise’s business system encounters performance bottlenecks or intermittent failures, VMware Tanzu struggles to provide precise data support from finer-grained levels such as namespaces and pods. This means that operational personnel lack sufficient granularity to quickly pinpoint the exact source of problems when facing issues like complex call relationships between microservices or resource competition. In such cases, operational personnel have to invest significant time in manual troubleshooting, which is effort-consuming and inefficient.

Furthermore, this lack of monitoring depth and breadth not only reduces operational efficiency but may also lead to prolonged business interruptions, directly impacting user experience and potential economic benefits. In a rapidly changing containerized environment, any business interruption can bring huge losses. Therefore, VMware Tanzu faces significant challenges in achieving refined operational management, prompting enterprises to place greater emphasis on the comprehensiveness and efficiency of monitoring and log management when considering the migration of container products from VMware to ZStack.

ZStack Zaku: Panoramic Monitoring, An Excellent Solution for Efficient Operations

Facing the limitations of VMware Tanzu in monitoring and logging, the ZStack Zaku container cloud platform provides a comprehensive, multi-dimensional monitoring and logging system designed to achieve efficient troubleshooting and excellent operations. ZStack Zaku not only covers monitoring at the cluster and node levels but also delves into fine-grained levels such as namespaces and pods, providing operational personnel with comprehensive and detailed system operation data.

The significant advantage of ZStack Zaku lies in its unified query management function, which can integrate logs from platform components and container applications, greatly simplifying operational processes. For example, operational personnel can use Zaku’s multi-dimensional monitoring capabilities to quickly identify resource competition issues in pods under a specific namespace. Combined with the unified log query function, they can further trace back to abnormal configuration parameters, thereby ensuring stable business operation and significantly reducing potential economic losses. This panoramic monitoring capability, from macro to micro, from real-time data to historical logs, demonstrates the strong capabilities of ZStack Zaku in the operational management of containerized environments.

ZStack: Let Every Company Have Its Own Cloud

ZStack was founded in 2015, committed to becoming a leading global provider of basic software in the intelligent computing era, providing users with digital intelligent computing power platforms. ZStack ranks among the TOP 5 in the IDC China Cloud System Software Market Report and was awarded the number one independent cloud vendor.

ZStack’s solutions are widely used in more than ten important industries and fields including government, communications, finance, energy, transportation, education, healthcare, and manufacturing, having helped over 4000 enterprises achieve digital transformation.

ZStack adheres to the “Simple, Strong, Scalable, Smart” (4S) product characteristics. Its product matrix comprehensively covers data center cloud infrastructure, including the ZStack ZSphere virtualization platform, ZStack Cloud cloud platform, ZStack Zaku container cloud platform, ZStack SDS distributed storage, ZStack Cube hyper-converged appliance, ZStack Edge cloud-native hyper-convergence, ZStack CMP multi-cloud management platform, and ZStack RDS database cloud platform. ZStack Cloud, as a new generation of IaaS software, is primarily designed for future-oriented intelligent data centers. It manages various computing, storage, and network resources within the data center by providing flexible and comprehensive APIs. Enterprises can use ZStack Cloud to quickly build their own intelligent cloud data centers, constructing flexible cloud usage scenarios such as VDI, PaaS, and SaaS. The platform uses an asynchronous architecture; a single management node can handle tens of thousands of concurrent API requests per second and simultaneously manage tens of thousands of servers and hundreds of thousands of virtual machine instances.

• In the era of intelligent computing, ZStack also released a new generation of AI software infrastructure——the ZStack AIOS platform, centered on AI, decoupling heterogeneous computing power and model ecosystem silos, achieving global metering and billing, and accelerating the penetration of enterprise AI applications. Selected as a representative vendor in Gartner’s “Innovation Insight: AI Infrastructure In China” (2025) report for China AI Infra.

When enterprises consider the overall VMware to ZStack migration plan, ZStack can provide a complete solution covering computing, storage, networking, and advanced operational management functions. Whether it’s gradually replacing VMware virtualization functions, improving management efficiency through hyper-converged architecture, or leveraging cloud platform elasticity for IT infrastructure modernization, ZStack can provide strong support.

Regarding VMware transition, it has served 1000+ customers globally, covering 30+ countries and regions.

FAQs

Q: In the context of container product migration from VMware to ZStack, how do the monitoring and logging functions of ZStack Zaku and VMware Tanzu differ in terms of the depth and breadth of data insights?

A: ZStack Zaku’s panoramic monitoring is superior to VMware Tanzu in the depth and breadth of data insights. VMware Tanzu’s monitoring and logging primarily focus on basic monitoring at the cluster and server levels, with limited dimensions. In comparison, ZStack Zaku builds a comprehensive, multi-dimensional monitoring and logging system covering multiple levels, such as namespaces and pods, able to provide more detailed and comprehensive system operation data.

Q: How does ZStack Zaku’s panoramic monitoring, through unified log query management, help operational personnel more quickly locate configuration anomalies in container applications?

A: ZStack Zaku, by combining multi-dimensional monitoring with unified log query management, can efficiently help operational personnel quickly locate configuration anomalies in container applications. When a problem occurs, its multi-dimensional monitoring system can quickly narrow down the problem to the scope of resource competition in pods under a specific namespace; subsequently, through the unified log query function for platform components and container applications, operational personnel can trace back to the specific configuration parameter anomalies causing the problem, thereby ensuring business stability and reducing potential losses.

Q: Besides container management, what other key capabilities can the ZStack Cloud platform provide in helping enterprises achieve a comprehensive VMware to ZStack infrastructure modernization transformation?

A: ZStack Cloud helps enterprises complete the modernization transformation from VMware to a self-controllable platform, providing virtualization and hyper-convergence transition solutions, supporting hybrid cloud and bare metal management, and possessing intelligent operations, disaster recovery and backup, high-availability architecture, and compliance assurance. The platform can be quickly deployed and upgraded, is fully self-developed and self-controllable, and helps enterprises achieve secure, efficient, and low-cost cloud infrastructure upgrades.

Q: For enterprises hoping for a smooth transition from VMware container products to ZStack, what advantages does ZStack Zaku have in integrating with existing IT environments?

A: For enterprises hoping for a smooth transition from VMware container products to ZStack, ZStack Zaku has significant advantages in integrating with existing IT environments. It supports managing external standard K8S clusters and provides multi-cloud multi-cluster management capabilities, enabling enterprises to seamlessly integrate existing Kubernetes environments. Furthermore, Zaku is deeply adapted with the ZStack Cloud platform, achieving unified operations and simplifying management complexity. Zaku also fully supports mainstream innovation architectures, is compatible with domestic chips and operating systems, and meets enterprise innovation transformation and compliance requirements.